After many years, apparently W3C DOM (thru Level 3) does not yet expose the
actual rendered values for critical layout style such as left, top, width,
height, and z-index:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2001OctDec/0135.html (also
follow the Next in Thread link)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109523#c8 ("...the W3C DOM api
does not provide a way to find where it's located on the page")
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42417#c14 (getComputedStyle
should not return values for the non-positioned)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2000AprJun/0109.html
(getComputedStyle is not the solution)
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/2000AprJun/0111.html
(getComputedStyle doesn't return Actual values)
Yet, Internet Explorer has exposed these (offsetHeight, offsetTop, etc) for
several years (since v4.0):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/ref
erence/properties/offsetheight.asp
Is anything being done about this? It appears the DOM Activity priorities
are on more esoteric matters, while DHTML (a very, very, very popular web
phenomenon) has to be written using IE's proprietary API (or is it the
defacto standard now?)
MORE IMPORTANTLY, it appears to be impossible to use exclusively W3C
standards to create applications based on a browser engine, because there
is no standard API to interact with the renderer/layout engine. This seems
like an extremely important issue for platform standards. Now we have to
choose between Mozilla or IE's proprietary APIs. The former not well
documented and not mature as a runtime environment, and the latter not
cross-platform and open.
IMHO, W3C is too silent about a core standard which will become a defacto
proprietary standard otherwise. Is this by design (i.e. W3C politics)??
Apologies in advance if I have missed some DOM Activity on this matter.
Hopefully I have demonstrated with links above, that I have researched this
issue. I start this to thread to collect the research (and replies to
follow) from others.
ALSO, there are the issues of exposing rendered selection, focus, and
scrolling. I started reading the Views and Formatting for CSS3 and
appeared on cursory browse that these issues are not addressed??
-Shelby Moore